Early snowmelt on the Rockies threatens Arizona's water supply

ARAPAHO NATIONAL FOREST, Colo. — The Colorado River’s retreat is conspicuous on the high peaks.

The whiter the mountains on the horizon, the better the outlook. The darker, the drearier. And it has been a long time since spring in the Rocky Mountains has gleamed reliably white.

This March, snow was melting all over Colorado, weeks ahead of schedule.

“Very unusual,” snowpack researcher Chris Landry said during an April field trip, following a winter of dreadful snow accumulation. “This year will be a test of how long people can irrigate, for sure.”

He would later happily amend that local farming outlook after a wet May helped fill the state’s reservoirs. But the rain wasn’t enough to rescue the river from another historically subpar year.

Twin climate-driven forces are robbing the Southwest’s most precious natural resource.

First, the Continental Divide peaks that gather and store crucial moisture as snow in winter are stacking up less of it than what Southwest farms and cities need.

And second, what snowpack does accumulate is melting sooner than in years past, a loss accelerated by the sunbeam-absorbing red soil that desert winds whip up from increasingly dusty lowlands and deposit on snowy slopes.

Evidence is mounting that the dust crunched up by off-road vehicles and livestock is multiplying as heat and drought bake grasses and shrubs off Southwestern deserts, loosening the earth. Scientists from Colorado and British Columbia universities tracked increasing calcium deposition to indicate this buildup over the past two decades.

Chemical testing has traced much of this soil to the arid Colorado Plateau, including a broad arc across the Navajo Reservation.

Dust rains down on snow and absorbs solar radiation. On average, University of Colorado researchers have estimated, the dust causes Rocky Mountain snowpacks to melt about three weeks earlier now than 150 years ago.

The rapid melting only worsens a drought that’s now older than anyone entering high school. It lengthens the season when water is sucked up by plants and trees and evaporates in the warming air.

Compared with the relatively dust-free days of the early 1800s, the early melting reduces river flow past Lees Ferry by 5 percent, federal and University of Colorado researchers concluded in a 2013 study.

Last year, a U.S. National Climate Assessment predicted the water supply would keep dwindling as the region continues warming.

The report in Colorado, based on the work of 300 experts, predicts that water in winter snowpacks will average 87 percent of the late-20th-century norm through 2050, then 74 percent by the end of the century.

Droughts are a natural part of the West’s landscape, often driven by shifting ocean temperatures. What’s different in a warming world is that a drought like today’s becomes more intense, said Connie Woodhouse, a University of Arizona geography professor.

Studies of Southwestern tree rings from a crippling drought during an unusually warm stretch in the Medieval period show how much worse droughts become when it’s hot.

“The conditions will be drier,” Woodhouse said, “and you’ll likely be under drought conditions for longer.”

Farmers, who use about 70 percent of the water diverted from the Colorado, fear a water grab from politically powerful but water-stressed cities. River runners and anglers watch their playground shriveling beneath them. Skiers are anxious.

The fears are no surprise to Landry, a former “extreme skier” turned snow researcher, nor to John Harold, a Colorado farmer dubbed the “Sweet Corn King” for his nationwide marketing of Colorado-grown produce.

From peak and valley — opposite ends of the state’s snow-water cycle — Landry and Harold have watched and worried for years as the mountain climate changed.

In a decade or so, Harold predicted, water “will be more valuable than gold.”

He’s switching to efficient drip irrigation because he doesn’t think downstream cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles will stand for waste at that point, regardless of whether he has rights to the water..

“That’s what’s going to nip us in the bud,” Harold said, “if we don’t do something about it.”

“Man, it’s warm,” Landry, 65, said as he prepared to dig a snow pit, peeling off a layer during a snowpack-gauging trip in April.

Landry, the founder and director of Colorado’s Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, was cross-country skiing from a two-lane mountain highway into a spruce-ringed site on Willow Creek Pass, where he routinely digs a pit to measure snow depth, weight and dust deposition. About a foot of snow remained on the target site, which is south-facing and sun-soaked.

It would be, he later said, the shallowest snow pit he ever dug.

All winter, the warmth had come and gone. By March, most of the mountainside plots that he monitors around the state had reached their melting points — a uniform 0 degrees Celsius that scientists call “isothermal.”

Landry’s March rounds led to ominous observations.

“Stream flows were double, triple, even 10 times their median rates all over the state,” he said.

Too early.

It meant that in Colorado, above the big dams that can stretch out irrigation seasons in Arizona and California, farmers were watching their summer water wash away even before winter’s end.

Fortunately, for some in select valleys, May would be unusually cool and wet.

May’s weather increased the expected flows into the reservoir at the Arizona-Utah border by 2 million acre-feet, about a sixth of what was stored there. Nonetheless, the center predicted that Lake Powell would gather only 70 percent of its average runoff this year — hardly relief for a giant reservoir that’s now less than half full and dropping every year.

“Unfortunately,” Landry wrote in his June 1 report, “May snowfalls and total March/April/May precipitation generally could not fully offset the poor snowpack development of the preceding winter months.”

The winter’s peak snowpack came extraordinarily early, and was skimpy. The U.S. Agriculture Department’s Colorado Snow Survey program measured the snow’s average water content across 144 upper-basin gauge sites at just under a foot on March 6. This was its second-earliest peak of the past 30 years, missing the 2012 record by a day.

Compare that to the last truly wet winter, 2010-11, when the peak snowpack didn’t come until May 1 and snow at the gauge sites held nearly 2 feet of water on average. Historically, the peak usually has come in April.

Landry founded the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies in Silverton, Colo., at the “tip of the spear” of Southwestern dust. His readings of snow water and dust content help to forecast meltwater timing and volume for the various water agencies who fund his work.

He has an ancestry in lives built on snow.

His father was an East Coast college kid recruited to the Army’s 10th Mountain Division to train in Colorado as a ski trooper for World War II, where he was deployed to the Aleutians and eventually wounded by a mortar in Italy.

His mother was a Denver native who learned to ski in school.

Landry grew into a noted “extreme skier,” a daredevil pursuit that, as a younger man, he defined for a Sports Illustrated interviewer as any descent in which an accidental fall would result in death. But now in his 60s, he complains dust has “ruined spring skiing.”

His findings in April didn’t bode well for quenching the drought.

This spring’s early thaw would compound years of drought that have brought the Southwest’s water use dangerously into focus. Lake Mead’s water level has bounced around 1,075 feet above sea level this year, an elevation that would trigger restrictions if it remained that low at the start of any year. This month the government said that won’t happen in 2016, at least.

According to the bureau, the winter’s early peak was more than 20 percent short of normal water content. Most melted before May’s cooling rains.

Downhill, in Colorado’s western-slope farming community of Olathe, Harold is adapting his realm. Harold has secured water to last the growing season. But if he doesn’t save water on his irrigated lands now, he said, he knows someone will come for it eventually.

“People need more water, and they look at anyplace that’s got water and say, ‘Let’s share,’” said Harold, a 74-year-old agribusiness pioneer whose company supplies 30 million trademarked “Olathe Sweet” ears to the Kroger-branded markets from Alaska to Phoenix to Roanoke, Va.

“It’s coming,” Harold said, predicting a Southwest-wide water shortage. “So what can we do?”

Agriculture pours 8 million acre-feet — a third of Lake Powell’s capacity and a healthy majority of what flows down the Colorado River most years — onto a few million acres of crops. It earns billions of dollars. Many of these foods and animal feeds are watered by inefficient flood irrigation.

Federal water managers measure liquid in acre-feet — the roughly 326,000-gallon flow that would be required to cover an acre to the depth of 1 foot. With the predictions that a Colorado River watershed that stretches from here to Southern California could need a few million more acre-feet per year in the next half century, wasteful farms are obvious targets.

Some experts have suggested that merely upgrading irrigation practices on those fields that feed livestock could plug at least a third of that shortfall. Others expect water to be transferred from farms to the city.

The Colorado River Research Group, an independent alliance of scientists and policy professors, said in its May report that, “like it or not, the vastly higher economic values of water in (urban) uses versus agricultural uses” will force financial agreements to save and then export water from farms.

Harold hadn’t read the report.

He didn’t need to.

His irrigation water belongs to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The lower basin, led by California, has seven times his state’s presidential electoral votes. He expects the agency or some other authority to impose efficiencies when political pressures demand it.

“Someone else will do it for us if we don’t,” he warned.

Most of his neighboring farmers in western Colorado’s Uncompahgre Valley are frozen by the fear that demonstrating efficiency will simply entice others to demand the saved water, and more, he said. On the whole, they apply a few times more water than their crops use, though “waste” is a relative term when their downslope neighbors benefit by reusing that water.

“I always tell friends, ‘I don’t see any of you on a 100-year-old tractor,’” Harold said. “You’ve got to change.”

He has installed drip-irrigation lines 7 inches or so under the surface, kept unclogged by a sand-filtration system, to replace many of his flood furrows. It cost about $2,000 an acre across 200 acres of low-till corn land and other high-value crops. That’s about $400,000 for a relatively small portion of his farm.

It cut water use by 40 percent on those fields.

Neighbors argue that such a dramatic cut reduces the runoff to supply them, the wetlands, farm wildlife, “yakety-yakety,” Harold said.

“I don’t know how accurate that is, but I do know you use less water in drip,” he said.

Harold is a Michigan native, and briefly covered sports for the New York Times in his youth. That he has always had ideas foreign to his valley is clear just by the fact that he started dabbling in sweet corn in the middle of ranch country, and then thrived in it after an unexpected visit from the Kroger corporate jet.

But even he says extending drip lines to the lower-value feed crops — the grasses and alfalfas that by some estimates consume half of the Colorado’s flow — could be too expensive.

There is federal grant money available to help farmers in his valley upgrade, though it generally doesn’t cover the full costs. The program is meant to reduce waste that washes minerals downstream from western Colorado’s extraordinarily salty soils.

Farmers can only afford to switch from flood irrigation if they have “off-farm dollars,” said Cary Denison, a local who works with the non-profit sport-conservation group Trout Unlimited to promote farm efficiency.

Most of these lands aren’t worth as much per acre as the upgrades would cost, and most of these farmers aren’t flush with cash, he and others said.

Increasingly the expectation is that if states or cities want more water flowing past farms, they’ll have to pay farmers to conserve it.

“What we do with our water (in Colorado) can increase supplies to Lake Powell and therefore Lake Mead, and shore up supply throughout the Colorado Basin,” Denison said.

Other farmers are wary of any attempt to squeeze water from their land, and especially when the advice is coming from a conservation group.

“What they’re really trying to do is pressure us to sell out,” said Phyllis Snyder, a 67-year-old rancher and feed producer in Cortez, Colo. “They want control of every stream in the state.”

Harold has a different take on urban demands.

“I care about Los Angeles because I’ve got something that Los Angeles wants,” he said. “So it’s not so much about Los Angeles as it is a care about my kids.”

The urban Front Range anchored by Denver also has designs on more western slope water that would otherwise flow down the river to Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Rerouting more water though pipes traversing the Continental Divide seems unavoidable in a state that gets nearly 80 percent of its water on the west side but houses more than 80 percent of its people on the east.

Two dozen tunnels and ditches move a tenth of the state’s consumed water — 500,000 acre-feet a year — across the divide. That’s enough for about 1 million Colorado households.

Denver Water expects to run at least 34,000 acre-feet short of demand by 2050 if nothing changes except for the population and the climate. The agency thinks the deficit could be 100,000 under especially snow-depleted climate scenarios. It proposes to fill a big part of the gap with Colorado River headwaters.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is reviewing a plan by the water provider to raise an existing dam east of the divide to accept 18,000 more acre-feet of Colorado River water through the Moffat Tunnel.

Glenwood Springs whitewater rafting company owner Erik Larsson fears that’s just a start.

Nearly 70,000 people pay to raft the Colorado’s Shoshone Section rapids every year. That stretch is just downstream of a hydropower plant that pipes the river through a canyon wall into its turbines. Worst-case, Larsson said, the power company could sell its water to Denver and rafting on the upper river would dry up seasonally.

“We don’t think it’s right for Denver to drink the Colorado River dry before it gets halfway across the state,” he said. “It’s irrational, and those guys don’t really have water restrictions.”

Conservation will quench part of Colorado’s thirst. Denver Water has already surpassed the 22 percent-per-person reduction goal it set based on its consumption in 2000, and is planning to set a new goal. Daily use is now 164 gallons citywide, while residential use stands at 90 gallons.

These figures are comparable to current use rates in Phoenix: 160 gallons per day citywide, 105 at residences.

Some institutions have made big changes to eliminate waste. Denver Zoo, with 2 million annual visitors, plugged leaks, recirculated animal pools and bought recycled water, saving 2.5 billion gallons since 1999.

It’s the kind of careful use that zoo sustainability director Jennifer Hale said she expects other institutions will follow as water gets scarcer and, likely, pricier.

“I don’t feel like we’re paying the true cost of water,” she said.

Denver Water residential customers pay about $460 a year — roughly the same as the average Phoenix household pays — for an average of 115,000 gallons. Much of it waters lawns.

“Our Number 1 consumer of water is grass,” said Moose Koons, owner of Denver-based Rocky Mountain Soda and a craft distillery. “People are so hell-bent on having green grass in their front yard, (but) we’re in a high desert.”

Denver Water likely will restrict outdoor uses during droughts, said Greg Fisher, the department’s director of demand planning. And with climate change, “drought periods are going to become a way of life for us.”

Harold relies on a microclimate that’s been just right for his crop. Like certain wine varietals, corn benefits from the contrast of crisp nights and warm days bringing out the sugars.

One day in April he toiled with neighbors branding and vaccinating an hours-long parade of calves through a ranch chute. The sun worked on the skimpy snowpack in the San Juan Mountains and the West Elks, two distant bands of black and white hulking in the southeast and northeast.

Several miles west of the branding party, beneath the olive and tan Uncompaghre Plateau, a Spanish-speaking employee of Harold’s opened and closed floodgates on a field of wheat destined for a Coors brewery. Next to that, in one direction hung pole-strapped vines of hops, and in the other a vented Foster Farms chicken house.

It is no exaggeration to say that the endangered waters of the Colorado River Basin feed America.

“We live in an awful nice part of the world,” Harold said, “but the world’s changing around us.”

In the new reality, he said, more farmers will have to save water whether they like it or not. He believes the Colorado River Compact, assuring his state’s share of the water, will come under revision in the near future.

On Rabbit Ears Pass, southeast of Steamboat Springs, Landry glided across the crystalline surface of an open meadow. Reaching his mark, he dropped his gear and took out a hand saw and a narrow shovel. He sliced a square into the snow at his feet, then hollowed it, carving himself a snow cubicle not much broader than the office variety.

Laboring through layers that had previously started thawing and then refrozen, he reached the bottom and started his April measurements: a folded yardstick for the depth, a cylinder hung from a hand scale for weight per volume and an electronic probe for temperature.

Except for the new, colder snow that a late-season storm had left on top, the rest of the snow was barely below freezing, almost ready to go.

Six inches below the surface, a dingy line emerged, marking the latest dust deposit. Once exposed to the surface and the sun, whenever that happened, it would accelerate the melt.

It wouldn’t take long. The snow was 42/3 feet deep, below average, and 8 feet shallower than some pits he had dug here in past Aprils, which required a set of snow steps to exit.

The U.S. Geological Survey has chemically traced most of the Rocky Mountain dust to sources on the Colorado Plateau, from the Navajo Reservation to Moab, Utah. It’s an area where human activities have crushed bacteria and lichen crusts that long held soils in place. The crusts need moisture to recover.

In a protected garden of native crust and brush outside her home overlooking the Moab Valley, federal soil scientist Jayne Belnap has been experimenting. She installed heat lamps to simulate global warming, and watched over eight years to learn how the roughly 2-degree Celsius increase that scientists expect by midcentury will affect them.

Expect even bigger dust plumes.

“The temperature alone is going to decrease soil moisture by 30 percent,” she said.

More than dust, Landry said, the snow itself is what will determine the river’s future. And, as the National Climate Assessment predicts, that snow may contain significantly less water.

“The fundamental issue for Colorado is having the snowpack to melt in the first place,” Landry said.

“And this winter — boy, we had two pretty long dry periods.”

For Harold, the farmer who expects a forced reduction in use, winters like these are just further incentive to change.

“The demand for water and the availability of water are out of balance,” he said during a trip into one of his fields to inspect a leaky center-pivot sprinkler.

“We don’t have enough water to meet the demand. How do you balance that?” he wondered. “You pray? Seed the clouds? Put a funnel to the sky? You tell me.

“Or you use less water.”